What is a tulip diagram?
It's the little picture in a rally roadbook that shows a crew what a junction looks like and which way to go. Rally people just call them tulips.
Open any rally roadbook and you'll see a column of small line drawings — a stalk with a shape blooming off the top, an arrow, a dot or two. Each one stands for a single junction on the route. Read together, top to bottom, they tell a navigator exactly how to get from the start to the finish without a full map. That's a tulip diagram, and it's the backbone of how rallies have been navigated for over seventy years.
How to read one
Every tulip is drawn as if you're looking down on the junction from above. There are only three things to learn:
- The ball — the solid dot — is where you enter the junction: the road you've just driven up.
- The arrow is the road you leave by. Follow it and you're back on route.
- The other lines are the roads you ignore — they're drawn so the junction looks the way it really does through the windscreen, so you can be sure you've got the right one.
So the whole instruction is: "you'll arrive here, the junction looks like this, take that road." One glance, at speed, done. A good roadbook adds the distance to the next tulip and a note or two, but the tulip itself carries the shape.
Where the name comes from
The notation is generally credited to the Dutch Tulpenrallye — the Tulip Rally — which has run out of the Netherlands since 1949. The style of little roadbook diagram it popularised took the event's name, and "tulip" stuck. It helps that a drawn junction, with its stalk and the shape blooming off the top, genuinely does look a bit like a flower.
Why rallies still use them
Because nothing beats them for the job. A tulip is read in half a second, in a moving car, on a bumpy road, often in poor light — a full map would be far too much to take in. It's language-free, so an event can run across borders. And it's precise: the organiser controls exactly where the route goes, which is the whole point of a regularity rally, where the challenge is holding an average speed, not finding your own way.
How to make your own
You used to draw tulips by hand, or wrestle with software that wasn't built for it. Tulip Maps is made for exactly this: lay your route on the map, drop the junctions, and it draws the tulips for you — sharp or curvy, with side roads, roundabouts and the official road signs — then exports a roadbook. It's free and runs in your browser.